“Sick bastard,” Isaiah said, launching a fusillade of punches. Jerome reeled. But he was on fire, and unafraid. In a moment’s respite he leaped at his man like an angered baboon. Isaiah, taken unawares, lost balance, and fell back against one of the doors, which opened inward against his weight. He collapsed into a squalid lavatory, his head striking the lip of the toilet bowl as he went down. The impact disoriented him, and he lay on the stained linoleum groaning, legs akimbo. Jerome could hear his blood, eager in his veins; could smell sugar on his breath. It tempted him to stay. But his instinct for self-preservation counseled otherwise; Isaiah was already making an attempt to stand up again. Before he could get to his feet Jerome turned about and made a getaway down the stairs.
The dog day met him at the doorstep, and he smiled. The street wanted him more than the woman on the landing, and he was eager to oblige. He started out onto the pavement, his erection still pressing from his trousers. Behind him he heard the giant pounding down the stairs.
He took to his heels, laughing. The fire was still uncurbed in him, and it lent speed to his feet.
He ran down the street not caring if Sugar Breath was following or not. Pedestrians, unwilling in this dispassionate age to register more than causal interest in the blood-splattered satyr, parted to let him pass. A few pointed, assuming hi man actor perhaps. Most took no notice at all. He made his way through a maze of back streets, aware without needing to look that Isaiah was still on his heels.
Perhaps it was accident that brought him to the street market; perhaps, and more probably, it was that the swelter carried the mingled scent of meat and fruit to his nostrils and he wanted to bathe in it. The narrow thoroughfare was thronged with purchasers, sightseers and stalls heaped with merchandise. He dove into the crowd happily, brushing against buttock and thigh, meeting the plaguing gaze of fellow flesh on every side. Such a day! He and his prick could scarcely believe their luck.
Behind him he heard Isaiah shout. He picked up his pace, heading for the most densely populated area of the market, where he could lose himself in the hot press of people. Each contact was a painful ecstasy. Each climax — and they came one upon the other as he pressed through the crowd — was a dry spasm in his system. His back ached, his balls ached. But what was his body now? Just a plinth for that singular monument, his prick. Head was nothing; mind was nothing. His arms were simply made to bring love close, his legs to carry the demanding rod any place where it might find satisfaction. He pictured himself as a walking erection, the world gaping on every side. Flesh, brick, steel, he didn’t care — he would ravish it all.
Suddenly, without his seeking it, the crowd parted, and he found himself off the main thoroughfares and in a narrow street. Sunlight poured between the buildings, its zeal magnified.
He was about to turn back to join the crowd again when he caught a scent and sight that drew him on. A short way down the heat-drenched street three shirtless young men were standing amid piles of fruit crates, each containing dozens of baskets of strawberries. There had been a glut of the fruit that year, and in the relentless heat much of it had begun to soften and rot. The trio of workers was going through the baskets, sorting bad fruit from good, and throwing the spoiled strawberries into the gutter. The smell in the narrow space was overpowering, a sweetness of such strength it would have sickened any interloper other than Jerome, whose senses had lost all capacity for revulsion or rejection. The world was the world was the world; he would take it, as in marriage, for better or worse. He stood watching the spectacle entranced: the sweating fruit sorters bright in the fall of sun, hands, arms and torsos splattered with scarlet juice; the air mazed with every nectar-seeking insect; the discarded fruit heaped in the gutter in seeping mounds. Engaged in their sticky labors, the sorters didn’t even see him at first. Then one of the three looked up and took in the extraordinary creature watching them. The grin on his face died as he met Jerome’s eyes.
“What the hell?”
Now the other two looked up from their work.
“Sweet,” said Jerome. He could hear their hearts tremble.
“Look at him,” said the youngest of the three, pointing at Jerome’s groin. “Fucking exposing himself.”
They stood still in the sunlight, he and they, while the wasps whirled around the fruit and, in the narrow slice of blue summer sky between the roofs, birds passed over. Jerome wanted the moment to go on forever; his too-naked head tasted Eden here.
And then, the dream broke. He felt a shadow on his back. One of the sorters dropped his basket he was sorting through; the decayed fruit broke open on the gravel. Jerome frowned and half-turned. Isaiah had found the street. His weapon was steel and shone. It crossed the space between him and Jerome in one short second. Jerome felt an ache in his side as the knife slid into him.
“Christ,” the young man said and began to run. His two brothers, unwilling to be witnesses at the scene of a wounding, hesitated only moments longer before following.
The pain made Jerome cry out, but nobody in the noisy market heard him. Isaiah withdrew the blade; heat came with it. He made to stab again but Jerome was too fast for the spoiler. He moved out of range and staggered across the street. The would-be assassin, fearful that Jerome’s cries would draw too much attention, moved quickly in pursuit to finish the job.
But the tarmac was slick with rotted fruit, and his fine suede shoes had less grip than Jerome’s bare feet. The gap between them widened by a pace.
“No you don’t,” Isaiah said, determined not to let his humiliator escape. He pushed over a tower of fruit crates — baskets toppled and strewed their contents across Jerome’s path. Jerome hesitated, to take in the bouquet of bruised fruit. The indulgence almost killed him. Isaiah closed in, ready to take the man. Jerome, his system taxed to near eruption by the stimulus of pain, watched the bade come close to opening up his belly. His mind conjured the wound: the abdomen slit — the heat spilling out to join the blood of the strawberries in the gutter. The thought was so tempting. He almost wanted it.
Isaiah had killed before. He knew the wordless vocabulary of the act, and he could see the invitation in his victim’s eyes. Happy to oblige, he came to meet it, knife at the ready. As the last possible moment Jerome recanted, and instead of presenting himself for slitting, threw a blow at the giant. Isaiah ducked to avoid it and his feet slid in the mush. The knife fled from his hand and fell among the debris of baskets and fruit. Jerome turned away as the hunter — the advantage lost— stooped to locate the knife. But his prey was gone before his ham-fisted grip had found it; lost again in the crowd-filled streets. He had no opportunity to pocket the knife before the uniform stepped out of the crowd and joined him in the hot passageway.
“What’s the story?” the policeman demanded, looking down at the knife. Isaiah followed his gaze. The bloodied blade was black with flies.
In his office Inspector Carnegie sipped at his hot chocolate, his third in the past hour, and watched the processes of dusk. He had always wanted to be a detective, right from his earliest rememberings. And, in those rememberings, this had always been a charged and magical hour.
Night descending on the city; myriad evils putting on their glad rags and coming out to play. A time for vigilance, for a new moral stringency.
But as a child he had failed to imagine the fatigue that twilight invariably brought. He was tired to his bones, and if he snatched any sleep in the next few hours he knew it would be here, in his chair, with his feet up on the desk amid a clutter of plastic cups.
The phone rang. It was Johannson.
“Still at work?” he said, impressed by Johannson’s dedication to the job. It was well after nine. Perhaps Johannson didn’t have a home worth calling such to go back to either.
“I heard our man had a busy day,” Johannson said.
“That’s right. A prostitute in Soho, then got himself stabbed.” “He got through the cordon, I gather?”
“These things happen,” Carnegie replied, too tired to be testy. “What can I do for you?” “I just thought you’d want to know: the monkeys have started to die.” The words stirred Carnegie from his fatigue-stupor. “How many?” he asked.
“Three from fourteen so far. But the rest will be dead by dawn, I’d guess.” “What’s killing them? Exhaustion?” Carnegie recalled the desperate saturnalia he’d seen in the cages. What animal — human or otherwise — could keep up such revelry without cracking up?
“It’s not physical,” Johannson said. “Or at least not in the way you’re implying. We’ll have to wait for the dissection results before we get any detailed explanations—“ ”Your best guess?”
“For what it’s worth…” Johannson said, “…which is quite a lot: I think they’re going bang.”
“What?”
“Cerebral overload of some kind. Their brains are simply giving out. The agent doesn’t disperse you see. It feeds on itself. The more fevered they get, the more of the drug is produced; the more of the drug there is, the more fevered they get. It’s a vicious circle. Hotter and hotter, wilder and wilder. Eventually the system can’t take it, and suddenly I’m up to my armpits in dead monkeys.” The smile came back into the voice again, cold and wry. “Not that the others let that spoil their fun. Necrophilia’s quite the fashion down here.” Carnegie peered at his cooling hot chocolate. It had acquired a thin skin which puckered as he touched the cup. “So it’s just a matter of time?” he said.
“Before our man goes for bust? Yes, I’d think so.” “All right. Thank you for the update. Keep me posted.” “You want to come down here and view the remains?” “Monkey corpses I can do without, thank you.” Johannson laughed. Carnegie put down the receiver. When he turned back to the window, night had well and truly fallen.
In the laboratory Johannson crossed to the light switch by the door. In the time he’d been calling Carnegie the last of the daylight had fled. He saw the blow that felled him coming a mere heartbeat before it landed; it caught him across the side of his neck. One of his vertebrae snapped and his legs buckled. He collapsed without reaching the light switch. But by the time he hit the ground the distinction between day and night was academic.
Welles didn’t bother to check whether his blow had been lethal or not; time was at a premium. He stepped over the body and headed across to the bench where Johannson had been working. There, lying in a circle of lamplight as if for the final act of a simian tragedy, lay a dead monkey. It had clearly perished in a frenzy. Its face was knitted up; mouth wide and spittle-stained; eyes fixed in a final look of alarm. Its fur had been pulled out in tufts in the throes of its copulation. It took Welles half a minute of study to recognize the implications of the corpse, and of the other two he now saw lying on a nearby bench.
“Love kills,” he murmured to himself philosophically and began his systematic destruction of Blind Boy.
I’m drying, Jerome thought. I’m dying of terminal joy. The thought amused him. It was the only thought in his head which made sense. Since his encounter with Isaiah and the escape from the police that had followed, he could remember little with any coherence. The hours of hiding and nursing his wounds — of feeling the heat grow again, and of discharging it — had long since merged into one midsummer dream, from which, he knew with pleasurable certainty, only death would wake him. The blaze was devouring him utterly, from the entrails out. If he were to eviscerated now, what would the witnesses find? Only embers and ashes.
Yet still his one-eyed friend demanded more. Still, as he wove his way back to the laboratories — where else for a man to go when the stitches slipped but back to the first heat? — still the grids gaped at him seductively, and every brick wall offered up a hundred gritty invitations.
The night was balmy: a night for love songs and romance. In the questionable privacy of a parking lot a few blocks from his destination he saw two people having sex in the back of a car, the doors open to accommodate limbs and draft. Jerome paused to watch the ritual, enthralled as ever by the tangle of bodies and the sound — so loud it was like thunder itself — of twin hearts beating to one escalating rhythm. Watching, his rod grew eager.
The female saw him first and alerted her partner to the wreck of a human being who was watching them with such childish delight. The male looked around from his gropings to stare.
Do I burn, Jerome wondered? Does my hair flame? At the last, does the illusion gain substance?
To judge by the look on their faces, the answer was surely no. They were not in awe of him, merely angered and revolted.
“I’m on fire,” he told them.
The male got to his feet and spat at Jerome. He almost expected the spittle to turn to steam as it approached him but instead it landed on his face and upper chest as a cooling shower.
“Go to hell,” the woman said. “Leave us alone.” Jerome shook his head. The male warned him that another step would oblige him to break Jerome’s head. It disturbed our man not a jig; no words, no blows, could silence the imperative of the rod.
Their hearts, he realized, as he moved toward them, no longer beat in tandem.
Carnegie consulted the map, five years out of date now, on his office wall to pinpoint the location of the attack that had just been reported. Neither of the victims had come to serious harm, apparently. The arrival of a carload of revelers had dissuaded Jerome (it was unquestioningly Jerome) from lingering. Now the area was being flooded with officers, half a dozen of them armed. In a matter of minutes every street in the vicinity of the attack would be cordoned off. Unlike Soho, which had been crowded, the area would furnish the fugitive with few hiding places.
Carnegie pinpointed the location of the attack and realized that it was within a few blocks of the laboratories. No accident, surely. The man was heading back to the scene of his crime.